


Inspiration

by lyricwritesprose



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-02
Updated: 2017-06-02
Packaged: 2018-11-08 03:04:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11072742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyricwritesprose/pseuds/lyricwritesprose
Summary: Endurance is its own kind of heroism.





	Inspiration

"So, how did you get into this benighted business?"

Martha looked up, startled. She had been contemplating the "coffee." It came pre-packaged in what looked like a microwave-safe cup; you pulled a tab, and the whole affair heated itself. It was the exact color of licorice and the consistency of keffir, and she seriously doubted the package's claim of "Original Genuine Terran Flavor (Kurava Free)."

"Do you mean, how did I get to Ishvansho, or . . ."

"Nah." Tyl Riat prodded a chair speculatively before planting herself on it. She was from a high-gravity species, she'd explained to Martha earlier; she had to be careful with all "lightweighter" equipment. She looked like a cross between a warthog and a male gorilla. She would have been seriously intimidating if she hadn't somehow managed to broadcast _I am a nurse_ on all available wavelengths—a mixture of compassion, briskness, and bone-deep practicality.

The pressures of Field Hospital Gamma were exhausting even her. Martha could tell. "How'd you get into the medical field?" Tyl Riat went on, pulling the tab on her own light blue beverage. "You're a doctor-journeyman on your own planet, right?"

"For what good it does me, here," Martha said, and claimed a chair herself. The people of Ishvansho—they were called the Hsvfth, and Martha refused to even try—looked like giant red velvet inchworms. What they actually _were_ —they belonged to a whole biological kingdom that Earth didn't have, walking plants or photosynthetic animals depending on whom you asked. Their internal setup was radically different from anything Martha had imagined, let alone studied. Her skills were nearly useless here.

Not _completely_ useless, though, which was why she had stayed while the Doctor went after the relief ship. Changing IV fluids, cleaning patients who had soiled themselves, administering painkillers—Martha followed directions, didn't need things explained more than once, and had enough medical knowledge to guess when a Ishvanshoan was coding, and that was enough to make her, effectively, a nurse-apprentice.

The plague was virulent, and if the Ishvanshoans hadn't been so different, the quarantine would have been much, much stricter. As it was, there were nurses and doctors from all animal species, working the overflowing tent hospitals and trying to keep from drowning in death. It was hard, horrible, and heartbreaking work. Martha had seen more than a dozen people die today, including a frail teenage boy (who looked like a giant red insect, but that wasn't the point) who begged her to try to find his parents before he went. She hadn't managed it. Sometime soon, she would probably have to have a cry about the whole thing, but for right now, all that was damped down and protected underneath a titanium-steel layer of efficiency.

"You're from a Lost Colony, right," Tyl Riat said. "Barum, was it?"

Martha was quite, quite certain that the Doctor had started picking fictional places for her to be from. "Barrayar," she said. She knew she'd seen the word somewhere, probably in the library back home—probably in some bit of serious science fiction that she had skipped over in a quest for something light, pink, and floofy to read for ten minutes before falling asleep. Medical school changed everything, even one's reading habits. "Yeah, we're a bit primitive by your standards."

Tyl Riat snorted. "In this place? That's an _advantage._ The number of nurse-apprentices who can't manage without smart-tubing—" She took a gulp of blue stuff. "Ah, forget it, I'm too flattened to rant. Seriously, though. Why medicine?"

Martha shrugged and sipped her own drink. It was vaguely coffee- _like,_ she supposed. "My mother told me I could be anything I wanted, and I believed her." If Martha had to identify a theme of her childhood, it would be _do not settle._ Do not settle for decent grades when you could have excellent ones, do not settle for a boy who likes you when you want one who loves you—her mum might have even told her, once, not to settle for being a nurse rather than a doctor. It took only half an hour in a hospital for Martha to work out how wrong _that_ one was, how little the two professions really had in common and how unbelievably stupid it was to ever, _ever_ disrespect a nurse. Still—go after what you want. Do not settle. "Also, I've always wanted to help people and I have no fear of internal organs. I _enjoy_ dissections; it's fascinating to see how it all fits. How about you?"

"Oh, childhood idol, the usual. I practically worshipped Nyssa of Traken when I was little."

"Who?"

Tyl Riat stared at her. "How lost _was_ your colony?" She waved the question away before Martha could formulate an answer. "Never mind. Not as if there's a scale of one to ten. Though that's something to imagine. One, a little bit lost, five, way the hell and gone . . ."

"With little cartoons under it," Martha suggested, "like the pain scale."

"Hah!" It was a startlingly loud noise, and Tyl Riat dropped her voice when she spoke again. "Nyssa of Traken was actually a biochemist and probably did most of her miracles in a lab, away from the patients, but that's not the way I imagined it when I was a wee one. I think I saw her as a sort of angel, floating amid rows of pale, fragile-looking patients. Who, of course, never spit up on her or threw things because their room's TriD wouldn't show _Platform Eight."_ Tyl Riat snorted at childhood whimsy, but she was warming up to her tale. "She's a bit of a mystery, really. You see, there was this station—converted starship, actually, huge place—where they used to basically dump people who had the lazar plague. Which, at the time, was considered about the same as your—" She hesitated. "Hansen's disease, is it? One of the nasty, extinct ones."

Martha hadn't gotten through her History of Medical Ethics class without hearing _that_ name more than once. Hansen's disease was leprosy.

"Anyway, the place has all the fun of a high-security prison and and a medieval sanitarium rolled into one, with total isolation into the bargain. The kicker is, there _was_ a treatment for the stuff. Arrested the progression of the disease, suppressed a few of the symptoms. You'd be _on_ it for the rest of your life, but hey, maintenance medication has been around longer than sand. So, you wouldn't expect it to be half as bad as it was. Only the company that had discovered the medication is doing a roaring business with planetary governments, removing their lazar populations—and there were just a _few_ political scandals about whether some groups were infected _before_ they hit the station . . ."

Martha nodded. "So, massive ethical disaster all around, check. Then what?"

"Then a woman shows up. Absolutely out of nowhere. She cuts a deal with the one sapient who has some idea how to _cure_ the disease, works out how to synthesize the medicine out of stuff you can find in any hydroponics department, finds a way to get cured lazars back to their planets so they can tell the tale about this corporation, and turns the space station into a hospital that all _other_ Multispecies Healing Centers are modeled on. Sure, it took her about twenty years to do all of that, but do you have any idea what it takes to make a hospital work with all the resources you please and the support of a government? This woman had _nothing._ In her old age, she pretty much put together the Golden Crane Interplanetary Medical Corps just as a relaxing hobby. Like knitting."

"Wow." Martha _did_ have some idea of what it took to make a hospital work. From the sound of it, this woman had to be a crack biochemist _and_ a brilliant politician _and_ a marvelous administrator. The last two might have been natural talent, but you had to learn biochemistry somewhere. "And there's really no record of where she came from?"

"She always claimed Traken. The Lost World of Harmony. There are biographies that say it was a philosophical statement, that she had retrograde amnesia and didn't know herself—" Tyl Riat shrugged. "I dunno, I've always liked the mystery. The idea that sometimes strangers materialize out of nowhere and help people out. Like superheroes." She drained the dregs of her blue drink. "Right, I'm back out on the floor. No, _don't_ rush—if we're going to run on stims and bloodymindedness, and let's face it, that's what everyone's doing—we can't stint on the stims. Take another cup if you have to. We're not short of _that,_ at least." She stood up. "And if you see your friend, tell him he's not too pretty to lift a finger. I know you said he's not a medical doctor but he can still clean things, and I haven't seen hide nor tusk of him since he left you here. Where's he hiding, anyway?"

Martha was tempted to say that she'd last seen him ducking into the linens "closet," which was both perfectly true and perfectly misleading. "He's helping," Martha said. "He just has his own way of doing it." Tyl Riat gave her a skeptical look that crossed all possible interspecies boundaries. "Seriously though, having him on the wards would be like herding grasshoppers. Just let it go."

~~~~~~~~

Just as the sun went down, the Golden Crane relief and resupply ship arrived.

Martha didn't get out in time to see it, although she heard the story over and over again from assorted staff members in the next few hours. According to them, the ship hadn't landed so much as _been lowered,_ by tractor beam or some other invisible force, onto the pad. And as soon as it settled, bits fell off. Disembarking crew told related what had happened, a highly technical accident that made the port engine unusable and forced them out of hyper, a maneuver that destroyed half their systems. They couldn't shed any light on who had rescued them. And no-one had seen another ship, although some people attested to a tiny squarish dot in the sky.

Most of the staff were so overjoyed that they ignored the enigma, or at least agreed not to prod it too forcefully. Martha did pass by Tyl Riat once, staring at the ship as if she thought she could make it blink. "There is no way," Tyl Riat said, "that thing could fly."

"I thought everyone said it was towed. Listen, Tyl Riat—I'll probably be leaving soon—"

"Do you have any idea," Tyl Riat went on, "of the odds against one ship happening on another in deep space? They were _five light years_ from the nearest star."

"But they had a distress beacon," Martha said. "Didn't they?"

Tyl Riat shook her head, looking almost haunted. "That's just it. They _didn't._ Nothing super-light, anyway; all that was destroyed in the crash transition. Oh, they could have rigged up some sort of glorified torch once they got the life support fixed, but a beacon that takes five years to reach anywhere with people? They were dead. Only here they are."

"Maybe," Martha said, "there was a superhero."

"I'm serious."

"So am I. Sometimes, people materialize out of nowhere and help other people out. Isn't that what you said?"

Tyl Riat looked at her for a very long moment. "Yes," she said after a while, "I suppose sometimes they do. So, moving on, are you?"

~~~~~~~~

When Martha found the Doctor, he wasn't filling up the room with excited chatter or the intensity of his presence. He was in the fourth ward, and he was helping a little Ishvanshoan girl drink water out of a human-made bottle, which was a sloppy business thanks to differing mouthparts. "—and on Squeeblim Prime," Martha heard him tell her as she walked up, "it's considered excellent manners to dribble on your host, so stop _worrying_ about it, all right?" He dabbed her fur dry with his hankerchief. "Now, remember to drink what the doctors give you. It's important." He rose. "Be good, Hwhishtsza." 

Martha resolved to corner herself a Time Lord and try to figure out if there really was a planet named Squeeblim Prime. She'd been right about the supposed planet of Humuhumunukunukuapua'a—although he swore he'd nicked the name off a real fish—but he still insisted there was (or had been) a Lost Moon of Poosh. She also, after a half-second assessment, decided not to attempt the interrogation tonight.

To someone who didn't know him, the Doctor would have looked normal. Martha thought he was a bit paler than usual, but that was nothing compared to the lack of motion, a lack that somehow made him seem thinner. And, most significant of all, he wasn't running on at the mouth.

She took his hand, and they walked back to the TARDIS in silence. He'd landed it at the edge of the hospital grounds, as much as Field Hospital Gamma had grounds. "They'll manage it," she said after a while. "Now that the Golden Crane people are here, I mean. As soon as they get a few people off of double shifts, things will get better. But it's—" She looked sideways at his set face and decided not to say _hard._ It was trite and he already knew. "This isn't your kind of crisis, is it."

A startled look. "I have a kind of crisis?"

"Actually, yeah. You do. You want something with a single root cause. That way, you can look at it from angles none of us think of and find a single, sweeping _solution."_

"Cutting the Gordian knot," the Doctor said. "The magic bullet, the perfect antibiotic. Well, why not? I'm _good_ at it. I'm brilliant, which helps with everything, I'm an outsider, which means I start out looking at things differently than everyone who has a stake in them—"

"I'm not saying it's _bad,"_ Martha said. "I was just noticing. This sort of thing—where the only answer is to get up in the morning and do the same things you did yesterday—it's not your scene."

"Mm." After a long moment—a _very_ long moment, considering his usual style of discussion—he added, "I went and looked. After I rescued the Golden Crane ship."

"Went and looked?"

"For whoever did this. Oh, there are people who would _love_ to see the Hsvfth decline to a few scattered remnants poor enough to be bought off with trinkets. Expansionists and imperialists and even oppressed minorities who dream of having their own world. I thought if I tracked them down, then—"

Then, Martha thought, they'd meet the other Time Lord. The one he kept half-buried beneath his chatter and friendliness and ironclad insistence on giving his enemies a chance to turn back. "You were looking for the smallpox blanket."

"Exactly."

"And?"

"And nothing. It's a natural illness."

"Oh." He had been desperate for a villain, Martha realized. Longing for one. A villain, a _person responsible,_ meant a chance to put things right in a single stroke. Martha wondered how many days—weeks?—had passed for him during her hours in the hospital. And how long since he'd last eaten or slept.

It was quite human of him, really.

"You're right," the Doctor said after a while. "I'm—not brilliant at this. The long slogs." He didn't savor the word _slogs,_ not like he normally would have. "I've travelled with some people who were, though." He unlocked the TARDIS door and went in.

Martha followed him in, hesitated, and then said, "Rose?"

She could practically feel his mental flinch. "Her," the Doctor said, and forced a much-muted version of his normal smile. "You. But, no." He turned around and flipped switches. "Probably," he said over his shoulder, "it's the place, the _smell_ of sickness—not that sickness smells the same between species, but so long as life forms are based on levo-proteins, there are similarities and _anyway,_ probably something about the hospital, but I was thinking about Nyssa."

Martha blinked several times, and then felt a marvellously unexpected smile begin. "Of Traken."

The Doctor turned around. "What?"

"Nyssa of Traken."

"What?!"

Oh, it was _so_ rare, and so delightful, to really floor him. Martha was tempted to see how many times she could get him to say _what?_ before he found another word. But that would be self-indulgent, and besides, her new story would definitely slice through his melancholia. "A new friend of mine," she said, "was telling me about inspiration. And unexpected heroes. And how the Golden Crane organization got started . . ."


End file.
